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Blog Tour – Illumination by Rowan Speedwell

A True Story

Thank you, Saucy Wenches Book Club, so much
for letting me share your blog and more importantly, share with your readers
some of the backstory behind the writing of Illumination,
my new book with Riptide Publishing. This book is very close to my heart, and
is, at least in part, inspired by true events.

A couple of years after I bought my house,
a young couple (we were all young in those days) rented the house next door. He
worked downtown; she stayed home with their toddler, a little girl, but had
worked in a law firm as a paralegal until Meg was born. We bonded over
yardwork, shared work experiences, and a mutual love of books. She became a
dear friend. She fed my cats when I was away. I babysat Meg, and later, Amy. We
barbequed together, and just hung out.

When her parents decided to move to a
smaller house, Laurie and Tom bought her parents’ place, but we still stayed
friends and saw each other fairly often. I knew that she had suffered from
childhood epilepsy, but hadn’t had an incident since she’d been an adult.
That’s why I was so taken aback when I ran into Tom on the train and he told me
she’d had a seizure over Thanksgiving and had spent the holiday in the
hospital. He said she was home now, and was doing fine; the doctors had thought
it was just a weird reaction to a virus or something, and she would make a full
recovery. Which she did. We got together a few times in the next couple of
months, and she was her old self.

A year or so later, she had another
seizure.

This time, she lapsed into a coma. Her
heart enlarged and she flatlined several times. Over the course of the next
month—again over a holiday, this one Christmas—doctors tried desperately to
keep her alive despite having no clue as to what had triggered the seizure or
what was causing her current state. Tom was frantic—they’d been married nearly
twenty years and she was the love of his life. Her daughters were terrified
that they were going to lose their mother.

Finally, just as abruptly as she had
collapsed, Laurie came out of the coma, after nearly six weeks. But that wasn’t
the end of the trauma she, her family, and friends had yet to go through.

I didn’t find out about Laurie’s condition
until a couple of months after she’d gone through rehab and was back home. Her
mother had died during the time Laurie was unconscious, and her father had
health and mobility issues, so Laurie’s sister contacted me to ask if I would
be able to come by and notarize his signature on some documents. I was
surprised that it was Laurie’s sister calling until she explained about what
had happened to Laurie, and finished with the odd statement: “She remembered
you, and that you were a notary.”

Why wouldn’t she remember?

Well, it turns out it was really peculiar that she did. Because Laurie had lost twenty
years of her memory. She had forgotten almost her entire life. She remembered
Tom, because she had known him that long, but was dismayed at how old he
suddenly was. She remembered high school, and part of college, but she didn’t
remember working, didn’t remember getting married. She didn’t remember moving
back into the house she grew up in.

Didn’t remember her daughters.

Movies and soap operas and books use
amnesia and other traumatic brain injuries as devices to create conflict and
move a story along, but in the end, it’s just the same person who’s forgotten
things. And usually another bump on the head restores the memories and all is
well.

Amnesia isn’t like that.

Amnesia is HORRIBLE.

Think about it. You, in the present, are
the end product of your years of experience, learning, perspectives. Things
you’ve seen, things you’ve read, things you’ve heard. Think about how much what
you’ve gone through in the last twenty—or ten, or five—years has informed your
attitudes, your perspective on life. Your personality.

Then think about what you would be like if
all those experiences, everything that shaped you into what you are, were
suddenly taken away. If you were suddenly twenty years old again, in a
forty-year-old body, with none of the wisdom and knowledge you’d acquired in
those missing years.

Everyone around you—even the people you
knew—is different. Strangers.

Life is different. We, traveling through time the way we do, don’t
recognize the minuscule changes that happen every day, that we adapt to without
thinking. Twenty years ago now was 1993. Think of all the things that we take
for granted that just didn’t exist then, or existed but weren’t as ubiquitous.
Internet. Video games. Cell phones. Hell, in 1993, my home computer was an
Apple II GS, with external memory we upgraded to one megabyte. ONE. And no
internal memory at all.

Laurie went through this in about 1997, so
twenty years would have been 1977. No computers. No Internet. No cell phones.
No cable TV. I remember stopping for gas with her in the car, and her marveling
at the fact that you had to pump your own gas now. She was like a child again,
but not in a good way. Everything was overwhelming. Everything was difficult.

All of her education, all of her training,
all her experience was gone. Her youngest started school that year, and Laurie
went back to work, but not as a paralegal, or even a secretary. The skills
she’d developed as a professional were gone. The best she could do was to get a
job as a crossing guard for her daughters’ school.

She had issues remaining from the brain
damage—she’d forget things, she suffered from depression, when she never had
before. Her older daughter had a terrible time forgiving her for nearly dying,
and as she entered her teens, started developing issues of her own.

I’m not proud of it, but I started drifting
away. I still see her occasionally, but the instances are growing farther and
farther apart.

The thing is, she isn’t my friend anymore.
Oh, I still like her fine, but our shared background, our common ground of
books and philosophy, was all washed away. We have nothing in common. What I
see in her face is someone who looks
like Laurie, but isn’t her. My friend Laurie is gone forever. It’s like she had
died.

I can’t even imagine how much worse it is
for her family.

Ever since this happened, I’ve had a hard
time watching or reading books where people have traumatic brain injury, and
yet recover completely with no aftereffects. It’s the brain¸ people. The center of your mind, your memory, your
personality. Yes, you may recover eventually, but there will always be
aftereffects.

Miles, in Illumination, got his brain damage from a totally different source,
but in the end, it’s much like Laurie’s. The changes to his personality affect
much more than just himself. Unlike me, though, Miles’s friends haven’t—and
won’t—give up on him.

For Laurie’s sake, I hope she has people
like Doug and Bobby and Lisa.

Illumination: Available from Riptide Publishing September 30, 2013

Adam
Craig is burned out. Lead singer of the hard rock band Black Varen, he’s tired
of the empty life of groupies, paparazzi, and hotel rooms. Worse, a life in the
closet. After the final concert of their latest tour, he flees the afterparty,
pursuing memories of lost summers and carefree days, until he passes out on the
patio of a shuttered lake resort.

Miles
Caldwell is a brilliant artist, tied by agoraphobia and social anxiety to his
family’s lodge. Alone but for his parrot, he spends his days illuminating
manuscripts and hiding from the complexities of life. When he discovers Adam
asleep in a deck chair, he’s furious but intrigued. Adam soon charms his way
into Miles’s bed, and they lose themselves in a summer idyll, safe from the
compromises and claims of reality.

But
Adam’s life, with all it demands, is waiting for him. And Miles, uncertain of
Adam’s true feelings, is battling demons of his own. Somehow, the man who’s
never home and the man who never leaves it must find the strength to fight for
a future together.

You can read an
excerpt and/or purchase Illumination at Riptide Publishing’s
website, here.

Bio

Rowan
Speedwell lives in a tarpaper shack in the North Woods, without so much as
cable TV to keep her warm. Compared to her, J.D. Salinger is an extrovert. She
is allergic to publicity and loathes marketing, so her books only sell one or
two copies. If you have one, she thanks you, as your purchase enables her to
buy cat food for her diabetic feline companion, Kimball O’Hara.

She does have Internet, when she hikes to the top of the mountain and fires up her PC Jr., so visit her website or follow her on Twitter at @rowanspeedwell if you need to request a refund for the one book you did buy.

Indeed a heartfelt post. I am dealing with a family member who has dementia and though it is a different kind of illness, the symptoms are very close, it is very difficult for the family and not so easy to be around. Sometimes I just want to flee the house. Thanks for your post RowanS.

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